Research Interests

Award-winning pianist Megumi Masaki is a pianist who specializes in the performance of Canadian music and new works. She is especially interested in exploring how sound, image, text and movement can be integrated in live multimedia performance and how the creative application of new technologies and approaches can expand how concert music is created, performed and received. She frequently collaborates on interdisciplinary projects with new technologies to enhance a dynamic interaction between creator and performer.

Numerous piano, multimedia (with interactive and fixed electronics, interactive and fixed visuals, and gesture tracking), and chamber works have been composed specifically for and in collaboration with Megumi and she has premiered over 70 works worldwide. One highlight, Hitchcock Études by Nicole Lizée commissioned and performed by Megumi Masaki was recently selected to represent Canada at the ISCM World Music Days in Poland 2014.

Megumi is a member of the Noiseborder Ensemble based at the University of Windsor. The Noiseborder Ensemble has presented more than 20 original multimedia pieces featuring a combination of acoustic and electronic instruments as well as live processing and mixing of sound and video. Megumi has been a collaborator for the past four years with the Noiseborder Ensemble on a research project Integrating Sound and Image in Multimedia Performance supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Research/Creation Grant $190,198. http://noiseborderensemble.com/

Megumi is an artist collaborator with composer and computer music specialist Dr. Keith Hamel and Dr. Robert Pritchard on the “Augmented Piano – Extending piano performance using gestural controls” research project at the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems (ICICS) Sound Studio and School of Music, University of British Columbia. This research project aims to develop a new digitally Augmented Piano system, essentially a three-dimensional keyboard instrument, which can be played by a trained pianist with a high degree of precision.

Megumi is also a member of the interdisciplinary Slingshot-Kidõ collaborative based at the University of Hartford that explores the creation of works involving a theatrical-dance-gestural-electroacoustic interdisciplinary approach to piano “shows” for traditional and non-traditional performance spaces. http://www.slingshotkido.net/